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Flickers of Desire
S T A R
★★★★★★★★★★
✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ AMERICAN CULTURE / AMERICAN CINEMA
D E C A D E S
Each volume in the series Star Decades: American Culture/American Cinema presents original essays analyzing the movie star against the background of contemporary American cultural history. As icon, as mediated personality, and as object of audience fascination and desire, the Hollywood star remains the model for celebrity in modern culture and represents a paradoxical combination of achievement, talent, ability, luck, authenticity, superficiality, and ordinariness. In all of the volumes, stardom is studied as an effect of, and influence on, the particular historical and industrial contexts that enabled a star to be “discovered,” to be featured in films, to be promoted and publicized, and ultimately to become a recognizable and admired—
even sometimes notorious—feature of the cultural landscape. Understanding when, how, and why a star “makes it,” dazzling for a brief moment or enduring across decades, is especially relevant given the ongoing importance of mediated celebrity in an increasingly visualized world. We hope that our approach produces at least some of the surprises and delight for our readers that stars themselves do.
ADRIENNE L. McLEAN AND MURRAY POMERANCE
SERIES EDITORS
Jennifer M. Bean, ed., Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s Patrice Petro, ed., Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s Adrienne L. McLean, ed., Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s Sean Griffin, ed., What Dreams Were Made Of: Movie Stars of the 1940s R. Barton Palmer, ed., Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s Pamela R. Wojcik, ed., New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s James Morrison, ed., Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s Robert Eberwein, ed., Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s Anna Everett, ed., Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s Murray Pomerance, ed., Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s
Flickers
of Desire
Movie Stars of the
1910 s
★★★★★★★★★★
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EDITED BY
JENNIFER M. BEAN
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
N E W B R U N S W I C K , N E W J E R S E Y, A N D L O N D O N
L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S C A T A L O G I N G - I N - P U B L I C A T I O N D A T A Flickers of desire : movie stars of the 1910s / edited by Jennifer M. Bean.
p.
cm. — (Star decades : American culture / American cinema)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978–0–8135–5014–5
(hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN
978–0–8135–5015–2
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography.
I. Bean, Jennifer
M., 1968–
.
PN1998.2.F5585
2011
791.4302'80922—dc22
[B]
2010035281
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
This collection copyright © 2011 by Rutgers, The State University Individual chapters copyright © 2011 in the names of their authors All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
For my students
C O N T E N T S
★★★★★★★★★★
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Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Stardom in the 1910s
1
JENNIFER M. BEAN
1
G. M. Anderson: “Broncho Billy” among the Early
“Picture Personalities”
22
RICHARD ABEL
2
Mary Pickford: Icon of Stardom
43
CHRISTINE GLEDHILL
3
Lillian Gish: Clean, and White, and Pure as the Lily
69
KRISTEN HATCH
4
Sessue Hayakawa: The Mirror, the Racialized Body, and Photogénie 91
DAISUKE MIYAO
5
Theda Bara: Orientalism, Sexual Anarchy, and the Jewish Star 113
GAYLYN STUDLAR
6
Geraldine Farrar: A Star from Another Medium
137
ANNE MOREY
7
George Beban: Character of the Picturesque
155
GIORGIO BERTELLINI
8
Pearl White and Grace Cunard: The Serial Queen’s Volatile Present 174
MARK GARRETT COOPER
9
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle: Comedy’s Starring Scapegoat
196
ROB KING
10
Douglas Fairbanks: Icon of Americanism
218
SCOTT CURTIS
11
Charles Chaplin: The Object Life of Mass Culture
242
JENNIFER M. BEAN
In the Wings
264
JENNIFER M. BEAN
Works Cited
269
Contributors
279
Index
283
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
★★★★★★★★★★
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No book is written on a tabula rasa, and no author is alone with her obsessions. This feeling of community is particularly acute when one shares the company of contributors such as these, each of whom I thank for their respective wisdom, their unwavering diligence, their shrewd thinking—and our shared passion. This book would not exist without the fierce encouragement of the series editors, Adrienne L. McLean and Murray Pomerance, nor would it have a home without Leslie Mitchner, the visionary at Rutgers University Press, whose patient support has enabled more than a few words of thanks can convey. At the University of Washington, Megan Bertelsen offered foundational research and a keen eye for copy, while Anagha Kulkarni’s tireless and exacting assistance in the final stage of production demands an equal note of gratitude. I owe far more than just gratitude to Tom Gunning, who reminded me (among so many other things) that early cinema gained the name “flickers” from its association with the rapid motion of light and the “flickering” effect previously associated with the behavior of flames. Light’s ability not only to reveal, illuminate, and enlighten but also to conceal, cast shadows, and create illusion underlies the tense dance between truth and doubt that every moving image brings.
A similarly strange dance surely defines our fascination with film stars, that luminous species whose appearances enchant and deceive even as they clarify what we otherwise might not recognize—or remember—as desired ideals.
Although this collection is highly specialized in the sense that it scrutinizes many figures and films buried by time, negligence, or habit, and although it attempts to cover ground that remains terra incognito even for other specialists, it is also meant for readers who care about the past out of intellectual curiosity rather than solely for professional reasons. I have been blessed these past few y
ears with a special group of friends whose intelli-gence reminds me that technical jargon and academic snootiness can hinder real learning. To Ernie Andres, Graeme Atkey, Chuck Burgess, Steve Davies, Gary Kratt, David Stob, and, especially, John O’Neal, I offer a reverent nod of praise, accompanied by heartfelt thanks for not only keeping me sane, but for teaching me to dodge the wickedest balls life can throw at you with an aggressive courage tempered by grace. I am indebted to my sister, Stephanie Bean, and to Michael Gundle for discussing the issues ix
x
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
debated here in a different context. It is in the context of the classroom, however, where my aims for this collection have taken particular shape, often angling against prevailing trends in history textbooks and developing alongside what my students were willing—or determined—to think about.
I dedicate this collection to them, and to the brilliant light their every question has cast.
Flickers of Desire
I N T R O D U C T I O N
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Stardom in the 1910s
JENNIFER M. BEAN
Nothing— nothing—like this had ever existed before. Stage stars were known only to those who could afford to see their plays. . . . The movies offered amusement to the masses.
—William J. Mann, The Biograph Girl
Desire is not simple.
—Ann Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet
There are a number of ways one might go about discussing
the origins of American film stardom and the inestimable impact of stars on the growth of a domestic industry through the course of the 1910s. One might feasibly begin by questioning whether or not it is even proper to speak of an origin for film stardom when a theatrical star system, similar in some formal properties although different in tendencies, preceded the invention of motion pictures by at least a century. The answer to this question of origins is both no and yes. No, because before there could be movie stars there had to be a conception of the film actor; and the flourishing of a predominantly narrative cinema after 1906, followed by the practice of hiring a stock troupe of regular players in 1908 and 1909, fostered an understanding among both the public and the motion picture producers that the people appearing on the screen were professional performers. Yes, because the unprecedented intensity of feeling that audiences expressed for their favorite “picture personalities” in 1910, and the rapid acceleration of a multimedia system shaped by mass technologies of communication and representation, hint that film stardom flaunts a difference at once qualitative and quantitative.
I begin with this wobble between yes and no in order to flag the complexity of a phenomenon impossible to pinpoint as a locatable or knowable event, a definite point in time, for it is an origin deeply implicated in a constellation of transformations. Such an approach refuses a dubious thesis much bandied about, still, among those who talk about film and where it came from (most notably, perhaps, in David Cook’s introductory textbook, 1
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JENNIFER M. BEAN
A History of Narrative Cinema), that “the star system was born” by virtue of a publicity stunt engineered by Carl Laemmle, supervisor of the Independent Motion Picture Corporation (IMP), in the spring of 1910. The story pivots on Laemmle’s coup in hiring the “Biograph Girl,” Florence Lawrence, circulating “anonymous reports of her death” and “using her real name in public for the first time.” Laemmle then “undertook an extensive advertising campaign to denounce the story as a ‘black lie’ spread by the Patents Company to conceal the fact that Miss Lawrence had come over to IMP” (Cook 36). Admittedly, in the spring of 1910 independent companies like IMP were struggling to compete with the near monopoly over distribution, production, and reception systems that the licensed members of the Motion Picture Patent Company (among them Edison, Kalem, Vitagraph, Essanay, and Biograph) had created in late 1908. And it is certainly true that Laemmle’s stunt labored to undermine public opinion of the MPPC while flaunting the “real”
name of a favorite “picture personality.” But as with so many textbook approaches to the telling of history, a temptation for neatness denies complex historical variables in favor of a sensational event that can hardly account for the “how,” “what,” and “why” of a nascent star phenomenon.
Why, for instance, did anyone care about the fate of a figure they knew only as the “Biograph Girl”? Why, when this new species lacked even an agreed-upon definition or set of advertising policies and principles, did fans express an electrifying proximity to their favorite players that amounts to a relationship at once imaginary and deeply felt? It is telling, for instance, that in April 1910 Moving Picture World reported “an extraordinary demand throughout the country by exhibitors for photographs of the actors and actresses. The patrons say they want to get a closer view of the people” (9
April 1910, 559). One month later, another writer for the same magazine trumpeted his astonishment at “the interest the public has taken in the personality of many of the picture players,” exclaiming: “Managers all over the country are begging the manufacturers to furnish them with photographs of their players so that they may be displayed in the lobbies of their theaters, and the people who are craving to see and meet the originals may be in a measure consoled” (21 May 1910, 825, emphasis added). Whether or not the flurry of photographs, postcards, lobby displays, and lantern slides circulating in the latter months of 1910 “consoled” viewers in lieu of “originals” is up for speculation. But there is no question that the articulation of public desire—an intensity of feeling conveyed through verbs like “begging”
and “craving”—plays a fundamental role in the lexicon of early film stardom. As the New York Dramatic Mirror, a relatively prestigious periodical traditionally devoted to news of theatrical and vaudeville circuits, announced
INTRODUCTION
3
in early 1912: “By devoting to portraits of players so much of the extra space allotted to motion pictures in this annual number, The Mirror is merely responding to the desires of the picture public” (31 January 1912, 51).
By titling this collection Flickers of Desire, my intent is not to grant unfettered agency to fans as stardom’s prime determinant, nor do I believe that any representation—in early film culture or in our own day—“merely”
responds to a perceived craving. Rather, viewer desire and representational strategies each produce and disquiet the other in a contagious, spiraling, multimedia phenomenon refracted through ever-mounting palimpsests of texts: images in films, photographs, portraits, caricatures, etchings, im-printed objects, and sketches; a flurry of stories, rumors, allusions, imitations, advertisements, press books, interviews, and eyewitness testimonies; a series of jokes, limericks, songs, dances, and so on. If this list looks messy, so be it. This is the prerogative of desire conceived in terms that implode normative regimes of signification, adamantly defying the logic of linearity and expediency, aggressively rerouting, protracting, and intensifying a kind of affect and ensuing effects often difficult to explain. This desire is the prerogative of a mass-cultural phenomenon that promiscuously migrates across media forms, fragmenting the unity of any single author or authorizing agency. It is also the methodological prerogative of contributors to this volume, who take early stardom’s multiple meaning-making sites as a scin-tillating challenge and render the relation between industrial ideology, cultural mores, and the circulation and consumption of cinema’s first decade of stars a productively difficult one.
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✩ Rebellious Humbug
Twenty years have passed since the publication of
Richard
deCordova’s now classic study Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, which remains (until the publication of the current volume) the only book-length consideration of stardom through the course of this decade. Beginning with the pioneering premise that grasping the implications of the actor’s performance in early narrative cinema demands a “discursive analysis” of extra-filmic factors, deCordova broke with formalist approaches dominant at the time and turned to a careful examination of trade journals such as Moving Picture World, primarily addressed to exhibitors, as well as to monthly magazines like Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay that addressed a larger public. Importantly, the latter two periodicals were launched in 1911. Both were primarily designed to relay stories from the films, and both initially included a small section that carried anywhere
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from a half dozen to a dozen photographs of screen players. Although Motion Picture Story Magazine (based in New York) favored the licensed companies and Photoplay (based in Chicago) favored the independents, the remarkably similar trajectory of the two begins within a few months, as both journals expanded their photo-based sections and carried columns titled “Answers to Inquiries” in response to fan letters requesting information about their favorite players ( Photoplay shortly retitled its section “The Question Box,” perhaps as a means of distinguishing itself). But “these questions led to and were answered by a name, an identification in a quite literal sense,” deCordova claims, while stressing that the identity of early
“picture personalities” was restricted to a discourse on acting and to information (at once sparse and repetitive) concerning their professional lives, their existence in films. It is not until 1913–1914 that a “marked expansion”
of knowledge privileging the player’s personal life became the primary focus of discourse and “brought into existence the star” (98).
By now, we have grown so accustomed to consuming the personal lives of film stars—individuals whose eating habits, fashion choices, marriages, divorces, affairs, childhoods, politics, and drug habits are flaunted as a matter of course—that the origins of such a phenomenon may appear inevitable in retrospect. That inevitability may have been felt from the very start, given what film historian Sumiko Higashi calls the insatiable “curiosity of devotees” plaguing editors with questions, the likes of which prompted Motion Picture Story Magazine to add a “Chats with the Players”